Shmuels Bridge, Jason Sommer
Shmuels Bridge, Jason Sommer
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Shmuel's Bridge
Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father

Author: Jason Sommer

Narrator: Josh Bloomberg

Unabridged: 7 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/12/2022


Synopsis

A moving memoir of a son's relationship with his survivor father and of their Eastern European journey through a family history of incalculable loss.

Jason Sommer's father, Jay, is ninety-eight years old and losing his memory. More than seventy years after arriving in New York from WWII-torn Europe, he is forgetting the stories that defined his life, the life of his family, and the lives of millions of Jews who were affected by Nazi terror. Observing this loss, Jason vividly recalls the trip to Eastern Europe the two took together in 2001.

As father and son travel from the town of Jay's birth to the labor camp from which he escaped, and to Auschwitz, where many in his family were lost, the stories Jason's father has told all his life come alive. So too do Jason's own memories of the way his father's past complicated and impacted Jason's own inner life.

Shmuel's Bridge shows history through a double lens: the memories of a growing son's complex relationship with his father and the meditations of that son who, now grown, finds himself caring for a man losing all connection to a past that must not be forgotten.

About Jason Sommer

Jason Sommer is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Portulans in the University of Chicago's Phoenix Poets series. He has been recognized with an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems about the Jewish experience and read from his work at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum's program "Speech and Silence: Poetry and the Holocaust." A former Stanford University Stegner Fellow, he has held a Whiting Foundation writers' fellowship as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences. With Hongling Zhang, he has published collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Sommer lives in St. Louis, Missouri.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emma on March 21, 2022

This is quite a fascinating story about a father, who was a Holocaust survivor, and his son, traveling through Europe to locate sites where the father experienced significant events during the war. The son, who wrote the story, learned a lot about his father and about himself on the trip. Their foca......more

Goodreads review by Reuven on February 26, 2022

Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father (Charlesbridge, 2022) by Jason Sommer Reviewed by Shira Yael Klein This is a Holocaust memoir that is very different from other books of the genre, in that it does not tell a chronological story about what happened to the autho......more

Goodreads review by Heidi on February 16, 2022

Seven decades after arriving in New York from war-torn Europe, Jay Sommer is losing his memory, erasing stories of his family, his escape from a labor camp, the important memories of his past. This has his son, Jason Sommer, reflecting on the trip he took with his father in 2001 to retrace his fathe......more

Goodreads review by Jinx on March 18, 2025

A very moving telling of a father, a Holocaust survivor, and his son on a journey to revisit a route taken to Auschwitz by an uncle who did not survive the journey. Along the way they pair also visit places that bring back some painful memories, but provide a chance to maybe enable the son to become......more

Goodreads review by Kim on January 12, 2025

Do any of us really know our parents as people, outside of their official roles in our lives? Probably not. Those of us who are of a certain age will have noticed that our parents had no intention of being our friends and thus didn't confide in us as kids. But what if one of your parents had lived t......more